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This is great news for small businesses and content marketers. The team here at Redberry Website Design have been praising the value and benefits for small businesses to develop and implement a consistent high quality content marketing strategy.

We have repeatedly sang the praises of content marketing as being uniquely well suited to small businesses because it is budget friendly - does not take a large investment. In fact, many techniques are DIY; It also removes barriers between you and your community and is shared with friends, family, relatives, colleagues (your community). Being an expert resource within a niche (you do one thing and you do it well) meas that you have many great tips, insights and strategies to give to your prospective clients and existing customers.

Taking the steps to create, share and promote this information through your website's blog and other social media sites is the essence of content marketing and now Google is rewarding your efforts with higher authority search results. Take a moment to read this article below that I found today on HotFrog.com. The author has done a good job explaining exactly what the changes to the Google algorithm mean to all small businesses.

Google's recent 'Panda' update changed radically the way the world's most powerful search engine indexes and ranks websites. The good news is that Google now respects 'higher-quality content'; the question is just what does that mean for small and medium-sized businesses?

In April 2011, Google - the world's most influential search engine – amended the way it ranks websites in all English-speaking countries with an algorithm update called ' Panda '. Unless you follow search marketing blogs and news you may well have missed this story, but it is vitally important – and beneficial – to the online marketing of small and medium-sized businesses everywhere.

What Panda did was clamp down on so-called 'content farms', content-heavy sites that featured high up on search engines purely on the strength of their text-based content and links. Most of these easily-findable sites are designed to generate ad revenues from page views but the relevance of their content to the average surfer is often limited and leads them to leave the site to look elsewhere for what they really wanted to find. Sites regarded as content farms have seen their visibility hit significantly by Panda while other sites – particularly those with comments and interaction on them – saw their domain visibility increase. An early indication of the early winners and losers can be found on the Searchmetrics blog.

Panda: It's not all black and white

Many of the 'quality content' sites that saw their search engine visibility increase were newspapers' online editions. For marketers this is significant, as coverage from one of these sources will often include a link back to their company website, which post-Panda carries even more weight than before.

This is great news for marketers and their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies as it means that, so long as they continue to follow SEO best practice, they stand a better chance of their content being found on search engines. Marketers can continue doing what they should be doing anyway, which is creating compelling, optimized content that engages target audiences wherever they are in their buying cycle and that can be easily shared on social networks. Given that length of time people stay on a site is also taken into account, it is essential to draw readers further into the website with more intuitive and insightful content.

Perfect your content marketing strategies

Now that Google has done small and medium-sized businesses a favor by punishing content farms' visibility, organizations need to perfect their content marketing strategies to make the most of the changes.

This means not only creating great content - such as blog posts and how-to guides, video and audio content on your own website - but also seeding content around the Web to help it be seen and shared even more. This strategy should include things like posting presentations on Slideshare, uploading informative and shareable video content to video sites such as YouTube or Vimeo (which were classed as 'winners' post-Panda), and sharing content on social networks such as Twitter.

Organizations are often unaware of the great content they already have lying around in folders: presentations from events, reports, white papers. Why re-invent the wheel if you already have a stack of great intellectual property to share already? Think about an editorial calendar and creating content that matches the needs of your different demographic of target audience.

To be effective at SEO and content marketing in general, small and medium-sized businesses need to work out which keywords and phrases they need to focus on and generate relevant, compelling and easily-sharable content around those keywords and phrases. A basic introductory course from an SEO marketing specialist will be money well spent here if you're unsure how SEO works. If you're successful it will pay back in terms of search visibility, traffic and – ultimately – new business. Make sure you track the performance of your keywords on Google – as well as Bing and Yahoo – over time so that you can see which keywords and phrases you need to focus your content marketing on.

Marketing managers should familiarize themselves with Google's own guidelines on how to improve the search visibility of their own website. Google Panda has done small and medium-sized businesses everywhere a favor by punishing content farms, the challenge now is to create that great content that will make the most of the opportunity.

Disclaimer: The 'winners and losers' statistics blog was created by Searchmetrics, a client of the author.

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